Building a professional experience for amateur athletes from scratch.

Strava. Homecourt. MyFitnessPal. All of these apps in the fitness space help the user track their progress and allow them to monitor their improvement. As someone who plays pickup basketball recreationally along with others on a regular basis, and I wanted to track our performance for these games to get a sense of improvement and status on a game to game basis.

Unable to find a tool that would help with this, we resorted to manually inputting this information in my notes app, which created many frustrations because it was not easy to use with the speed of the game. With the text being so small it took a lot of precision and scrolling to update the players stats. the space for a tool like this was being carved and I wanted to investigate its necessity/demand to see if there was an opportunity to marry my passion for design with my love for basketball.

Before doing any designing, I first wanted to explore the first success metric: will a platform like this be used by other amateur basketball athletes?

Because I play basketball in a pickup environment, I queried those who play with me about if they care about their stats in game. While some mentioned their lack of interest in quantitative data with their games, others expressed the sense of wonder around their on court production. I began to interview those in and out of my circle who participate in these pickup basketball runs to determine if there was a use case for this type of tool. Below are some key excerpts from those interviews:

The one that stood out the most was that they would "feel like an NBA player". That was all I needed to hear. A tool like this could provide amateur players with a luxury that professional players experience. With the interviews demonstrating the demand for a tool like this, I got to work to bring this idea to reality.

The product had to be more than just a clicker app, I had to map out all the steps in the players journey when looking at pickup basketball.

Examining this journey, the MVP of the product would need to take account for the players playing in the current game, track the individual scores, and add them up into a tallied game score. With this information, I was able to craft a user journey for the proposed product.

Workshopping this flow with interview participants revealed that any supplemental tech needs to be fast-paced to match the court action. Inputting everyone's name before entering the "input game stats" section would slow things down, leading to frustrations due to expensive and limited court time, so I made this step optional. Additionally, it was suggested that the flow should return users to the input game stats screen if the same number of players want to play again, reducing wait times.

I had enough information to move on to the fun part: wireframing. I explored a variety of different styles of interaction for the input game stats function of this product and returned to my original interviewees for their feedback.

Through this ideation exercise and feedback it was clear that incorporating all tracked stats in this module would be overwhelming for the user. I also consulting online basketball forums on Reddit and came to the conclusion that cataloguing points related stats would have the highest value.

This birthed the first iteration of Pickup:

As the sole developer on the project, I wanted to create a smooth development process for myself. I handed off the prototypes into Zeplin, and created cheat sheets for different components used in the app. I seamlessly organized and annotated each element, giving myself a comprehensive overview of the project. Zeplin's intuitive interface allowed me to view detailed specifications, pixel-perfect measurements, and style guides, ensuring precision in the implementation of the design.

With a coded prototype, I returned to my pickup spot and introduced the product to a new set of, more advanced participants. Veteran players initially resisted, but I demonstrated the product's benefits, particularly its ability to track scores, addressing a common difficulty. By the end of the session, many players were eager to check their shooting stats and shared how the tool would improve scorekeeping in the circuits they volunteer at.

This exercise was valuable beyond validating the product's demand; it revealed design flaws. The game's fast pace meant my stat tracking buttons were too small, causing participants to fear hitting the wrong button or missing entirely, which would skew data. To address this, I redesigned the prototype with larger, single-use buttons and an undo button to revert recent changes. Testing showed these changes made the tool simpler to navigate and more reliable for stat tracking.

Many projects I've delivered ended with a complete handoff, this is a project I want to deliver and continue to develop after it's live. Being able to go beyond user testing and try it out in the field was an amazing experience, one I hope to continue as the product develops. This tool for myself and my peers has already achieved the goals I was hoping for on a personal level, now it’s time to bring this product to others.